Jeepers Creepers
From AwardAnnals
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| Director(s) | Victor Salva |
|---|---|
| Distributor | MGM (Video & DVD) |
| Honors | |
| With confident style and low-budget ingenuity, Jeepers Creepers gets under your skin, provoking spine-tingling horror when college siblings Trish (Gina Philips) and Darry (Justin Long) encounter a flesh-eating demon along a barren rural highway. After a harrowing car chase that sets the movie’s nerve-wracking tone, they investigate suspicious activity near an abandoned church, where a corrugated pipe leads to unimaginable horrors. What follows is a cat-and-mouse game against the regenerating demon, which feeds on fear—and selected body parts—according to a… | |
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
With confident style and low-budget ingenuity, Jeepers Creepers gets under your skin, provoking spine-tingling horror when college siblings Trish (Gina Philips) and Darry (Justin Long) encounter a flesh-eating demon along a barren rural highway. After a harrowing car chase that sets the movie’s nerve-wracking tone, they investigate suspicious activity near an abandoned church, where a corrugated pipe leads to unimaginable horrors. What follows is a cat-and-mouse game against the regenerating demon, which feeds on fear—and selected body parts—according to a psychic (Patricia Belcher) who adds chilling portent to the routine climax in a besieged police station. Writer-director Victor Salva (Powder) emphasizes primal fear over logic, but plot holes are easily forgiven when you’re scared out of your socks. A surprise box-office hit in late summer 2001, Jeepers Creepers will please even jaded horror fans with its back-to-basics frights. —Jeff Shannon
Barnes and Noble
Though slick and self-assured in its delivery, Jeepers Creepers opts for genuine monster-movie scares over the self-referential humor of recent teen flicks. A brother and sister, Darryl (Justin Long) and Trish (Gina Philips), take the long way home for Spring Break, and their car breaks down on a long country road with a storied and horrific past: More than 20 years ago, a young couple came to a mysterious and terrible end here, as evidenced by the wreckage of their car and the boy’s decapitated body—neither the girl nor the boy’s head were ever found. Before long, Darryl and Trish find themselves mired in a struggle for life and limb—literally—against the Creeper (Jonathan Breck), a sinister monster who needs his victims’ body parts in order to regenerate his own. Setting itself apart from the late-’90s tongue-in-cheek horror of Scream and its peers, Jeepers Creepers plunges into the 21st century with a straightforward nightmare premise and simple cinematic mechanics—run or die! Atmospherically directed by Victor Salva, the film makes up for its occasionally implausible plotting with a never-ending air of dread, the kind of suspense that horror fans crave. The cast of fresh faces leaves the floor open for the film’s real stars, the Creeper and some expert makeup effects. R.J. Wafer
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Related works
Despite the usual symptoms of sequelitis, Jeepers Creepers 2 delivers the goods for those who enjoyed the 2001 original—a group large enough to propel this sequel to a record-setting opening in August 2003. While establishing the flesh-eating “Creeper” as a new horror icon with frantic action and more elaborate special effects, writer-director Victor Salva follows the traditional formula, dispensing with plot almost altogether and focusing entirely on threat, menace, mayhem, and gore. That’s likely to disappoint horror fans hoping for a more revealing…
